Bhutan has attracted thoughtful writers since it opened cautiously to tourism in the 1970s. Two useful starting points are Jamie Zeppa's Beyond the Sky and the Earth (1999), a memoir of teaching in rural Bhutan that remains one of the most honest accounts of life in the kingdom, and Linda Leaming's A Field Guide to Happiness (2014), which covers daily life in Thimphu. For a darker angle, Kunzang Choden's Chilli and Cheese is a collection of Bhutanese short stories by the country's first female novelist in English. Karma Ura's The Hero with a Thousand Eyes reconstructs a 17th-century Bhutanese epic and gives unusual access to the historical worldview behind the dzong architecture that dominates the capital.